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The king said to Daniel, ‘May your God, whom you faithfully serve, deliver you!’

Monday, March 27, 2017

Who sinned: this man or his parents?

Grace and Peace

Rabbi, who sinned this
man or his parents?

There was a man born
blind

In two small verses, John tells us how Jesus took dust, spat on it, and put this on his eyes.

That’s 2 verses. The
other 38 verses of this story are a trial to determine whose sin is most
present.

The miracle takes up
this much type.

The inquisition of sin
takes up the rest.

It makes you wonder if
this gospel is the prototype for our newspapers.

This much good news,
this much of crime, revenge, and problems.

Let this be a note- if
your gospel, the one you write every day has this much good news, and this much
bad news, you need a new editor!

As we editorialize
this text together, let us take notice that the miracle is considered an
insignificant subject for discussion.

Everyone wants to know
who sinned- this man or his parents.

As in, he is blind,
therefore someone must have done something to make God angry and strike him
blind.

And, since he was born
that way, either his parents made God angry or the boy somehow ticked off the
man upstairs while still in his mother’s womb.

And what gets to me is
who asks this question- the disciples.

Who sinned? Them or
him?

Now the pastor in me
wants to tell you that your children cannot suffer from your sins. Your sins
are wiped clean through the blood of the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of
the world. You are forgiven and that is that. Your sins do not transfer to your
next of kin, period.

But the preacher in me
can’t stop there.

Your sins are
forgiven, but not forgotten on
this earth. Our children inherit or sins and will have to pay for them.

Biologists have
discovered that changes in behavior in our lifetime works on our genetic code
and can affect the DNA that we pass along to our children. That means if we are
angry or addicted it changes the owner’s manual in our body that gets passed
along to our children’s children. We have abused our bodies and pushed them
over the limit of what is healthy.

Other than ourselves,
we give our children this Earth. Except our sins of greed and selfishness have
made the planet arguably worse than when we got here. We’ve used up a lot of natural
resources. We’ve made the air and water quality harder to sustain life. We’ve
cut down the rainforest to raise more cattle for our inflated diets. And
reports are coming out now that we waste over half of the food we produce.

Which is curious since over half the world goes hungry. We’ve taken the oil,
diamonds and gold and killed each other over it

We’ve used nuclear
bombs other warfare that has harmed the land and the people in it.

Other than ourselves,
and the world we inherited, we leave them our debts.

Think let’s imagine that you make 100k a year, imagine that you owe 108k, and growing
every year. The government- which really means us and our children- have
a rising debt so much that every now and then we have to vote to borrow more
money to pay the bills of the money we already owe.

Somebody call Dave Ramsey.

Our kids are on the
hook for our spending. For the sins of their parents.

It’s a good thing we
didn’t leave them anything else, like racism, sexism, classism, distrust of
leadership, insolvent social security, homophobia, Islamaphobia, rising sea
levels, a shrinking church, or reality television, because that would be too much if we left those things behind as well.

Oh wait, we left them
all that too?

Shoot.

They might not thank
us for what we have bequeathed them. They might not want to pay for the sins of
previous generations.

But they will. Because
of the sins of their parents, they will pay.

So today we have a
message that isn’t one thing or the other. We might have to sit in the
uncomfortable place of both/and. Are sins have been forgiven. We have been
saved. But who will save our children?

These questions keep
Ashley and Me up at night sometimes.

We wanted to bring our
children into a world full of possibility and hope.

Not a world full of
sin, selfishness, and social anxiety.

But you can’t have one
without the other, can you?

I find myself more and
more talking to our confirmation students about how the world desperately needs
them to be faith leaders, to be world formers, to be equality fighters.

Ultimately, the
story of the man born blind isn’t about the miracle, but the conversation about
sin, where the word ‘sin’ shows up 8 times in these 40 verses.

The question the boy’s
sin, the parent’s sin, Jesus sin for healing on the Sabbath.

And as goes the nature
of sin, each character- including the boy’s parents- point the finger at the
next character in a sort of witch-hunt for the sinner.

He did it- ask him.

It’s hard to imagine
that anyone thinks a person is born blind because of sin.

Yet, doesn’t Jesus say
if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out, for it is better to lose one
part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into “Hell”, or if your
right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, so that your whole body doesn’t burn.

How many of us could
raise our right hand- raise it high if you’ve not sinned with it. Yeah, that's what I thought.

Does God really want us to lose our eyes and hands because of our sins? Does God want us to pay?

Or maybe, what God
wants most, if for us to become aware of
our sin.

Maybe God’s purpose
for that statement regarding our eyes, is so we open them to see the beauty and
miracle of what God has done in this world. That we find the gospel in the two
verses, in the newspaper, in our schools, and in our children. Maybe the point
of the miracle is that those who were blind can now see.

And maybe God’s
purpose for the statement regarding our hands, is not to cut them off, but to
open them. To extend a hand up to those in need. To greet our enemies and make
peace with them. To hold those who need to be held and pat on the back those
who need encouragement.

We should not be
surprised by the presence of sin in our world. And nor should we ignore it.

The first story of
Adam and Eve is one where God created them out of clay. He breathed into them
and they became animated, in his image.

But the problem with
being mortal is worshipping mortality.

Trusting in ourselves
instead of God.

We worship our
mortality when we use up the world’s resources at an alarming rate.

We worship our mortality
when we take what is ours with little thought to who we took it from

We worship our
mortality when we’d rather go to war than live on less

We worship our
mortality when we give our children problems because we are too busy or proud
to solve them

We worship our
mortality when we are willing to waste the food that fall from our table while
others deal with empty bellies

We worship our
mortality when we make weapons to destroy the planet and threaten others to do
the same

We worship our
mortality when we pass the buck, point the finger, blame the next person for
sin.

It has never been
God’s plan for us to worship our mortal life. The slivers of gospel that we
receive give us a hope that does not disappoint.

I met probably the
coolest Lutheran pastor I’ll ever meet this last week in California.

He tan, preaches at
the beaches, and teaches surf camp, all in San Diego.

Pastor Dave told me
that he has seen an uptick in young adults from the area that show up for Ash
Wednesday for the past few years. He says he thinks it is because people like
to remember that their lives are but an instant, and then we go back to dust.

So it should come to
no surprise then, that Jesus uses mud, dust mixed with water, to heal the man,
and then sends him on his way, a common scene in John for someone who has been
given new life.

Jesus sends away the
blind man the same what he did the Woman at the Well, with fire in their hearts
and hope in their eyes. He sends them with the promise of Eternal life.

We worship eternal life
when we give just as easily as we receive

We worship eternal
life when we consider the consequences of our actions and change our behavior

We worship eternal
life when we confess that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves

We worship eternal life
when we take the long road, the high road, the road less traveled

We worship eternal
life when we stand up for the needs of others instead of standing on our
foolish pride

We worship eternal
life when we acknowledge God’s great abundance instead of our lie of scarcity

We worship eternal life when we take two lines
of text and let the miracle make the headline.

We worship eternal
life when we take God’s work in our world seriously, God’ forgiveness
seriously, when we take God seriously.

We must remember that
we are dust, we started out as dust, and without God’s breath, we are nothing
but dust. And to dust we shall return.

Sisters and brothers.
Our world desperately needs you to care about the sins of our time.

We cannot continue to
walk in darkness when we have seen a great light.

God has done great
things for us that we need to pass on to our children and our children’s
children.

Let us pass on the faith, not just our fears.

Rather than asking who
else sinned, this man or his parents, let us confess our own.

Let us walk and talk
in the promise of eternal life.

I don’t know what the
future holds, but I do know that only God can help us deal with it.

Tis grace that brought us safe this far, and
grace will lead us home. Amen.

About Me

Pastor Daniel Pugh is an ordained Millennial. He loves Berkeley, Texas, and North Carolina. He's a bleeding-heart conservative who loves the environment. As Parents of three, Daniel and Ashley live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where Daniel serves as a pastor at Augsburg Lutheran Church.